No experience with the current edition, but the original Car Wars was more than just a armed vehicles fighting each other, something that became increasing clear as stuff came out for the game encouraging moving beyond the arena. You could just use it for minimal context fights, but there was a weird RPG there that offered a lot more replay value. It eventually had an extensive post-Collapse setting (which seems adorably naive in 2025) though the AADA Road Guides, rules expanding to all sorts of vehicles that really weren't going to see use outside of campaign of some kind, solo "choose a paragraph" adventures akin to TFT's Death Test, and variant time periods (eg Chassis & Crossbows, for a more Mad Max feel) and other weirdness (magic in The Space Gamer, superheroes in Autoduel Champions) supported through Autoduel Quarterly.
The gimmick was that you weren't playing specific characters (at least until they could afford Gold Cross insurance for pseudo-immortality) so much as you were playing groups, or parts of a larger group. Your "PC" was often a single car or truck or small pack of bikes with its gunners and drivers (always have a backup driver) and support crew, and the other PCs were usually work for (or the founders of) some kind of organization, taking jobs like troubleshooting, escort and courier work, bounty hunting, ir even running a truck stop or just trying to rebuild civilization a bit. Took some buy-in, but you definitely saw even those fragile, minimalist (at first, anyway) sketches of people riding in those cars come to mean something beyond their stats.
If it wasn't for that style of play I don't think CW range would have wound up a tenth the size it did, although it did eventually smother under its own weight and waffling focus between the pure one-off wargamer and campaign play audiences. There were a few too many new bits and bobs in the Uncle Al's catalogs, a few too many oddities like Boat Wars that just didn't draw enough buyers, and then one day there was no further support in the pipeline and it withered away as so many unsupported games do. There are bound to be CW fans from both major camps still playing, but that's just a vestige compared to the scene I recall.
But that's probably not quite what you're after, so let's dredge up some other old games. SPI's Swords & Sorcery is dual-mode hex-and-counter fantasy wargame and a one-to-one scale hero-questing game, much like their take War of the Rings and to a lesser degree Freedom In the Galaxy. Either element can be played by itself, or they can run in parallel, and there are scenarios for all those options. The "questing" side of things is pretty simplistic for a true RPG, but it does include an actual character generation system as well as a bunch of named pre-gens, including the famous Gygax Dragonlord. Whos is a dragon. That lords over other dragons.
They also had two solo or semi-solo dungeoncrawl game, Deathmaze and Citadel of Blood. The later explicitly shared the S&S setting, with the Citadel being built over the hellgate and home of a succession of Dark Lords. Both of them had crude classes, lists of spells, magic items to loot, and rules for generating your own very, very simple characters to go a-delving. Deathmaze was alos memorable for one of the magic "potions" being just plain cannabis, which effectively acted as a haste spell because everything's moving so...slowly... Arguably closer to an actual (albeit super-light) roleplay experience than early Descent was, since at least it wasn't all pre-gens.
